Beat Dyscalculia the complete maths programme in a box

Sign up for our Members’ Area and get access to 12 training videos and other additional resources.

Once you’ve bought your Beat Dyscalculia packs we want you to be able to get the most from them, and so we’ve created a video training course that goes through all the essential elements (such as the Addacus and Number Strips) and looks at how to use the resources to teach certain key topics (such as time and times tables). The course is designed so that you can work your way through it, from start to finish, in your own time, or you can dip in and out to refresh your memory. Ideally, we’d recommend that you use the videos to supplement the face to face classroom training that we offer (with our founder and creator, Celia Stone), and as an additional training tool for you and your colleagues. Find out more about our training packages here.

Beat Dyscalculia Accredited Trainers

However, we’re also starting to create a network of Beat Dyscalculia accredited trainers and would like to hear from you if you are interested in finding out more.

The Videos

Each of the 12 videos was filmed with local teachers who volunteered to be trained by Celia, and were learning about Beat Dyscalculia for the first time. Each one is between about 5 and 15 minutes long and is designed for you to watch and work through the exercises shown for yourself. Key topics and teaching points are highlighted with pop-up captions, and each video is split into sections covering each pack (1, 2 and 3), so that you can find the bits that are relevant to you.

Members’ Area

The videos are available via a new secure Members’ Section of our website for a yearly subscription of £180. This can be bought via our shop. However, you can watch the first video for free here, which gives you an introduction to and overview of the Beat Dyscalculia programme. Once you’ve subscribed, you can access this section whenever you want, as often as you want. Plus we’ll use this section to give you access to other resources such as electronic versions of the CDs and books, training hand-outs, and additional ideas and resources as we create them. Let us know if there’s anything you’d particularly like to see in this section.

Ideal for helping struggling learners to catch-up or to bring a different approach to numeracy lessons

Make your budgets and Pupil Premiums go further

Buy any of the items in our shop (including Beat Dyslexia, our multi-sensory literacy programme), bundles (for teaching groups of children at the same time) or special offers (combining our packs and training) before your year end for a 10% discount (quoting Year End Offer)

And remember, once you’ve bought a pack, it can be used over and over again to help teach as many children as you need.

Each pack includes a fully photocopiable workbook, CD to guide you through the programme, and a range of durable, colour-coded, multi-sensory resources.

New Dyscalculia Assessment Available Now

What are the signs of Dyscalculia? We have collected together a list of the difficulties experienced by people who may have a diagnosis of Dyscalculia, which you can find on our new assessment page.

Having worked in the U.K. in the field of Dyslexia for over 32 years and more recently Dyscalculia for the past 10 years, I believe that, with all learning difficulties, the process of arriving at a clear diagnosis often involves peeling away layers of possible learning difficulties until you arrive at the fundamental issues.

The aim of this assessment is not as much to arrive at a clinical diagnosis as to identify potential areas of difficulty and more specifically to give parents and teachers a clear idea of how to remediate these problems.

We’ve created packs with the right number of resources for either 3, 6 or 10 pupils, at a discounted price (compared to buying each item separately). Several packs can be bought together to make up the right number for your class.

We’ll be adding Classroom Packs for Boxes 2 and 3 shortly.

And we’ve now added all 6 Beat Dyslexia books (our original step-by-step, multi-sensory programme!), which, as the authors, we’re allowed to sell at a very competitive price!

We’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who volunteered their services (including Vicky McKinnell and Farnley Tyas First School, Allison Deighton and Bowling Green Primary School, Cassandra Rei from Laidlaw Hall, Amita Shah, and Sheila Capewell) and helped to make the filming of our training videos a big success last week. In particular, we’d like to thank Jo Liversidge and Betty Stathers from Nature’s Footprints Forest Play and Education CIC, and Helen Collier, Specialist Speech and Language teacher, who feature in the videos with Celia.

Altogether we filmed 12 short videos, covering all the essential elements of the Beat Dyscalculia kits (including stringalongs, the Addacus, rainbow numbers etc.) and how to use them, plus how to use the resources to teach key topics such as time, times tables, fractions and decimals, and money.

The videos are designed to work together as a course to supplement the classroom-based training courses that we offer, or as a refresher for schools who’ve had some training or who need to train up additional members of staff.

The videos will be available along with other downloadable resources via our website shortly.

In recent months, a number of schools have approached us who are in the process of reviewing the whole of their maths provision and are looking for a new way of teaching numeracy. Even though our products work as an effective intervention (and we’ve chosen to call our kits, ‘Beat Dyscalculia), our multi-sensory approach works for any child and learning style and makes sure that children have a good understanding of number concepts rather than just learning by rote. And our boxes fit with the new National Curriculum in Numeracy which will be brought in in 2014. (Read more here)

Here’s a recent case study from Helen Cusack, Head Teacher of St Mary’s Catholic Primary School in Birmingham:

Rationale

In St. Mary’s, the learning of early mathematics had been characterised by the children engaging with a ‘coded system’ of digits and numbers before gaining a solid grasp of number. Despite much discussion and in spite of some very high results at both KS1 and especially at KS2 there was a growing concern about the quality of real grasp of number amongst our youngest pupils. Believing that concrete and visual learning are necessary before abstract learning can develop we decided to purchase Beat Dyscalculia from Addacus to strengthen this gap.

Training

All teachers and teaching assistants have undergone 6 hours of training, led by facilitator Celia Stone, who developed these resources.

The training offered the staff the opportunity to use all of the equipment and to be taken through Books 1, 2 and 3 very methodically with opportunities to try out some of the pupil exercises, to reflect on the inter relationships between the cards, strips and Addacus (e.g. colour coding) and to discuss what constituted a solid grasp of the number 3(i.e. the ‘threeness’ of three) or 10 or 100.

The staff have been absolutely on board with the philosophy of Beat Dyscalculia from Addacus and are in the process of reformulating their own thinking and teaching of maths. It has become a ‘hot topic’ in the staffroom and the professional support and discussions are truly wonderful. To this end, it has been a very unifying experience.

Evaluation

The staff has piloted the scheme in several year groups. Some of their comments highlight the gaps in numerosity and mathematical understanding of the children as well as raising questions on how best to employ the resources – how to assess which children need it most.

Year 5:

“The children enjoy using the equipment. Its logical links of colour and shape to number digits and dot cards make it easier for children to “see” the quantities they are asked to work with and compare one number with another to answer questions such as, “What is 1 more or less than this number?” The children’s vocabulary has been strengthened by the short narratives about the number 1, 2 and 3 and they enjoy using such vocabulary as “unique, solitary, pair, twin, trio” and they have told their own stories using similar terminology.

One difficulty that has emerged for these children is the use of the symbol =; the word cards help to explain this means “is” but the children also need to know that the balance between both sides of an equation should have the same value though may have a different appearance.”

To find out more about Beat Dyscalculia or to book training for your school, please contact us.

We’re currently working our way through the Government’s proposals for a new Numeracy Curriculum in Primary Schools and are pleased to announce that Beat Dyscalculia can be used to teach everything except mass, weights, capacity and volume measurements and geometry.

In fact, our multi-sensory approach takes the more abstract elements of numeracy that aren’t naturally multi-sensory (unlike weighing or measuring something) and makes them concrete, fun and easy for children to investigate and understand. It focusses on many of the aims of the new curriculum including

making sure that children are fluent in the fundamentals of maths,

that they can reason and solve problems for themselves,

and that they work at their own pace and consolidate understanding before moving on

and in fact it also meets some of the literacy objectives by including stories, songs and poems and focussing on the language of numbers and maths

We’ve created a table (downloadable as a pdf below) showing how Beat Dyscalculia can be used to teach the Year 1 curriculum and will add tables for the other years as and when we’ve completed them.

We’re offering a day’s free training to anyone who’d be happy to feature in our training videos. Ideally we need 5 or 6 people to take part in one of our normal classroom-based training sessions with MD and Co-Creator, Celia Stone and we’ll film the session. We’re happy to have individuals from different schools or if you’d like us to come to your school and run a session for a group of your staff, let us know. And as a thank you, we’ll let you have access to the finished videos.

Ideally we’d like to film sometime during the week beginning 2nd December, ideally on a week day or a Saturday.

The aim of the videos is to allow us to offer Celia’s expertise and training to a wider audience. They’ll be available to watch/download from our website with a selection of other resources. Once a school has signed up, they’ll have access to them for as long as they need and for as many people as they need.

Five Games for Playing with Hedgehog Number Cards

Here are some additional games to play with your Hedgehog Cards from Beat Dyscalculia Pack 2. These are designed to build confidence, check understanding, and let children get used to playing with and using numbers and help them practise:

Recognition of numbers 1 to 100

Reading numbers in ascending, descending and random order

Basic functions

Times tables

Mental maths

Numeracy language, speaking and listening

GAME ONE

Deal 10 cards to each child, one gets numbers 1 to 10; the next numbers 11 to 20, the next 21 to 30 etc.

Ask children to:

Arrange and read the cards in ascending order

Arrange and read the cards in descending order

Shuffle the cards and read in random order

Place shuffled cards face-down on the table and on the signal, pick up cards, read them and place them in the approximate position which will enable the whole set to be arranged in ascending order

3. Swap cards with someone and repeat

GAME TWO

As game one, but use cards that are not in sequence (e.g. 7, 18, 35, 68, 12, 49, 3, 55, 74, 92)

GAME THREE

Choose a selection of cards, depending on the ability of the child (e.g. numbers 1 to 10 or 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 or the teen numbers or a random selection of higher numbers) and place them in a stack in the middle of the table.

Prepare another pack of “challenge” cards (which reflect the stage and ability of the child or children), with functions on them such as:

+10

+0

+20

x 1

x 2

– 1

– 10

+ 5

+ 9

x 0

Divide by 1

Divide by 2

Halve

Double

Treble

3. Deal a hedgehog card to each child.

4. Turn over the first challenge card

5. Children work out their answer and then indicate when they have it.

6. Pupils get 1 point for a correct answer and an extra point for speed.

7. When pupils have worked through these they can be shuffled and turned over and the game can continue

GAME FOUR

Use numbers 1 to 10 or 12 to practice times tables using times tables cards (as demonstrated at the front of Book Two)

GAME FIVE

Arrange the cards from 1 to 20 in order, 1 to 10 on the first row and 11 to 20 on the second row (can be done up to 24 if required)

Children now pick up the multiples of 2 (i.e. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, etc) and arrange them in order across the table

Pointing to the 2 they say 1 two is 2; 2 twos are 4 etc

Next they scatter them on the table at random and the teacher asks, “How many twos in 8?” etc

Repeat for other multiplication tables using additional rows of numbers (e.g. for x4 your will need the numbers 1 to 40, or 48 if doing 12×4)

To find out more about Beat Dyscalculia or to get more ideas or training. Please contact us.

I have been thinking again about problems with the empty box calculations and came to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to practise with the children using the reading pack sentence cards and a blank card to replace the empty box, before giving them the written work. This would get them prepared.

So when making sentences you would do lots of:

2+3=5; 3+2=5; 5=3+2; 5=2+3

Now place the blank card on top of one of the numbers and say, “What am I hiding?”